As a side note, it’s funny to see so many of these emails with thirsty academics repeatedly enact Marx’s bit in the 1844 Manuscripts about the power of money. “Oh Mr Epstein, your house in New York is enormous and, unrelatedly, your questions at dinner were so intelligent, so insightful, so deep.”

Day 1 Foundations of causal inference

🎄 Still looking for a gift for your favourite social scientist? How about a #preprint with 717 urban areas, 30 countries, and 16,164 models of #Immigrant #Segregation across Europe? Just published with @kasimirdederichs.bsky.social & David Kretschmer 🎅 🎁 Wrapped up here: arxiv.org/abs/2512.17037

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Since the first International Workshop on Analytical Sociology in 2008, INAS is returning to Oxford. The 18th Annual INAS Conference will take place from 1 to 3 July 2026 at the University of Oxford, hosted by Nuffield College and the Department of Sociology. Submission deadline: 1 Feb 2026

Are we going through the dispute of positivism once again? 😳

How does employer access to prisoners’ labor through work release impact the well-being of those workers & of free workers? New working paper by Sue Helper, Suresh Naidu, Akseli Palomaki, Adam Reich, + me provides evidence, focus on auto manufacturing in AL #EconSky papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Excited to announce the launch of a new working group at Nuffield College, the Generative² Social Science Lab (co-organised with @pablogerbas.bsky.social). We will have our first meeting tomorrow at 11:00am, come join us! More details here: github.com/gen2socscila...

Our submission to Journal of Vegetation Science for a special issue has been sitting for six months with zero reviewers, after JVS switched to this system. I just resigned as an editor of Global Ecology & Biogeography today (after 7 years) because I can no longer do my job effectively.

Job alert! Join us at @nuffieldcollege.bsky.social as a postdoctoral fellow to work on your own research for three years. #sociology

Great work by @pablogerbas.bsky.social! Loved the clear, causal lens on educational mobility — such a productive framework. The insights on Chile’s 2015 tuition-free policy were especially compelling. Thanks @mebucca.bsky.social @andreacanales.bsky.social @taniahutt.bsky.social for the workshop!

`tinyplot` v0.4.2 is now available on CRAN + R-universe 🎉 Mostly bug fixes, but includes some important integration improvements for Positron IDE users. Release notes: grantmcdermott.com/tinyplot/NEW... #rstats

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

I am often told that public critique of published articles must also solve the issues found. I think this frequently enforced requirement hinders scientific self-correction. Blog post: mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...

🔥Coming July 2: 'Metrics and Models'!🔥 A new seminar series on advanced modelling w/ impact across health/society. 🌍 Open to *ALL*! 🕑 Weds 2pm UK alternating weeks (online) 🔗 metrics-and-models.github.io 📬 [email protected] Brilliant speakers. *Please share*!

There's no doubt that editors for academic publishing need more help and support to keep things going. But my god, this isn't it. I've published in a number of OUP outlets. This would force me to reconsider. I suspect other #SkyStorians will, too.

Should LLMs be used to review papers? AAAI is piloting LLM-generated reviews this year. I wrote a blog post arguing that using LLMs as reviewers can have bad downstream consequences for science by centralizing judgments about what constitutes good research. bryanwilder.github.io/files/llmrev...

🚨 REPLICATION REPORT UPDATE: One year ago, a tweet by John Holbein alerted me, @ollefolke.bsky.social, and @jopieboy.bsky.social to a paper with a shocking result about Sweden’s law criminalizing the purchase of sex.🧵

Folks, always share your code. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be helpful. And if you feel that it’s still too messy or not sufficiently clean to be shared, you shouldn’t submit yet. After all, there could be mistakes in your mess.

Also, *please* don’t compare this to the climate change (denial) discourse. I’m strongly opposed against such rhetorical moves that try to cash in on the hard-earned trust that *other* scientific fields have built up.

Update: the application deadline for this position has been extended until Feb. 12!

GEORGE LUCAS IN 1999: a trade embargo is going to spark the galactic reckoning and collapse ME IN 2025: ah, okay

We are delighted to announce a call for papers for a forthcoming special issue on ESR @europeansocreview.bsky.social Education and Social Mobility: Celebrating Richard Breen’s Contribution to Sociology Deadline for submission: 15 of June 2025 More details on the call 👇

SFI is a research hub, home to between 20 and 50 resident and visiting researchers at any given time. SFI is currently seeking applications for full-time resident faculty. These 5+year appointments offer broad intellectual freedom and encouragement to take risks. 1/2

We’re thrilled to announce that this year’s keynote speaker is Prof. Aaron Clauset, from CU Boulder. He is one of the world's foremost experts in Network Science and Complex Systems Apply by 3 March www.maths.ox.ac.uk/events/summe... @aaronclauset.bsky.social @colorado.edu

We are hiring!! (2 positions) TT Assistant Professor position in #Demography and Population Health. DEADLINE 02/02/25 Please share www.upf.edu/web/politiqu... #sociology

New working paper out today with @epiellie.bsky.social called "Do LLMs Act as Repositories of Causal Knowledge?" Can LLMs (ie ChatGPT) build for us the causal models we need to identify an effect? There are reasons to expect they could. But can they? Well, not really, no. arxiv.org/html/2412.10...

Announcing the ISA RC28 2025 Summer Meeting at UCLA! Conference theme: “Social Inequality and Labor Market Restructuring;” Keynotes by Michael Hout and Xi Song Conference dates: August 4-7, 2025 Abstracts due: February 17, 2025 See you in L.A.!

`etwfe` v0.5.0 is now available on CRAN (and R-universe). grantmcdermott.com/etwfe/ As a reminder, `etwfe` makes it easy to estimate Extended TwoWay Fixed Effects a la @jmwooldridge.bsky.social. Super flexible and good for nonlinear models, recovering heterogeneous TEs, etc. #econsky #rstats 1/3

Imagine finding out @vincentab.bsky.social @noahgreifer.bsky.social and @andrew.heiss.phd wrote a thing and it's open access 👀 Awesome paper about {marginaleffects} R/python packages in JOSS (which needs to join Bsky) www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...

🚨 We're hiring! 🚨 Join us as an Associate Professor in Social Demography, in association with @stjohnsox.bsky.social. We're open to a range of specialisations: family, fertility, gender, migration, population health, inequalities & more 🌍 Apply now ➡️ www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/article/asso...

Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions -- out today in the AER! www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/x4bc1...

Excited to present my ongoing book project at Nuffield college on Wednesday. Very grateful to @cmonden.bsky.social for the invitation. Hope to see some friendly faces if anyone is in Oxford this week www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

And @guilhermeduarte.bsky.social's causal inference one too go.bsky.app/FdemGAZ

I'm trying to compete with @stephenjwild.bsky.social's DAG People starter pack, because economists believe in competition Open to suggestions! go.bsky.app/Fa2XSDH

Theorist bridge trolls barking at you to formally connect theory to data? Wondering how, without troll magic? We can help! "Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution" With @dominikdeffner.bsky.social @natyfedorova.bsky.social Jeff Andrews. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Using LLMs for code review is amazing and terrifying. Amazing because in a few seconds you get good suggestions for improvement. Terrifying because it makes unexplainable changes based on random assumptions about the data.

I wrote about Eric Turkheimer's recent book on "the nature-nurture debate", which should be of interest to people thinking not just about the genetics of behavior but complex traits more broadly. A 🧵:

Hey #academicsky, there's a great opportunity for a visiting fellowship for someone from the Global South in Arts and Humanities, to spend time at Cambridge. Do pass on! www.cai.cam.ac.uk/vacancies/vi...

🚨 The Colorado Index of Complex Networks (icon.colorado.edu) is reborn! ICON 2.0 indexes 699 distinct research-quality network data sets, classified into 6 domains (Social, Biological, Information, Economic, Technology, Transportation) and 53 subdomains /1 #networkscience

Academic writing thought: That it was hard for YOU to figure something out does not mean you should make it hard for the READER to get it Explain as simply & clearly as you can You do not need to take the reader through your lengthy journey to clarity Work that took months may end up a footnote

Happy to see this finally out! Led by the amazing Bernie Koch, who also wrote the coding tutorials. Enjoy! t.co/c7NlbrUesL

#introduction I am a Prof at Oxford. My research lies at the intersection of several fields, including #econometrics, #machinelearning, #labor, #inequality, #AI. I post links to papers, talks, long-form articles etc. Website: maxkasy.github.io/home/

Nice short reminder and example that visualizations are analyses --- representation strongly influences interpretation

This quote 👌🏾

Look at the video - the professor expresses concern about the assault of a protestor, touches no-one, and then is assaulted herself by police twitter.com/robertmackey...

This is a witch hunt targeted primarily at scholars of color who study race. Chris Rufo now going after Christina Cross for "plagiarism" - his go-to example is *descriptions of data that are similar.* There are only so many ways you can describe data!

‼️JOB‼️ Assistant Professor at ERCOMER, @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social, interdisciplinary social science department. Profile with expertise on discrimination, radicalization, polarization esp. welcome. Position permanent after 1year. Deadline: April 14. www.academictransfer.com/en/339028/as...

A new version of `etwfe` is available on CRAN. This v0.4.0 release includes an important bug fix for the (non-default) "never-treated" case, so please update if you use the 📦. For more info about (e)xtended (t)wo(w)ay (f)ixed (e)ffects, see the website: grantmcdermott.com/etwfe/ #EconSky #rstats

New preprint alert! **Credible causal inference beyond toy models** (Now in BlueSky!)